A 10-year old-boy and his 6-year-old sister were walking home from a park in an affluent Maryland suburb. The police stopped them and are now investigating their parents for child neglect.
The parents are said to be part of the “free-range” parenting movement. But I walked seven blocks to and from school from the time I was in the first grade, aged six. And once I could ride a bike, the whole town was my playground. My parents, who were not part of any movement, certainly weren’t neglecting me! Are the times that much more dangerous today? Evidence would suggest not, and yet letting a six-year-old walk to school like that probably seems unthinkable to most parents. (It’s unthinkable to me, thinking of my grandchildren!)
From Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone – The Washington Post:
It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children.
“We wouldn’t have let them do it if we didn’t think they were ready for it,” Danielle said.
She said her son and daughter have previously paired up for walks around the block, to a nearby 7-Eleven and to a library about three-quarters of a mile away. “They have proven they are responsible,” she said. “They’ve developed these skills.”
The Meitivs say they believe in “free-range” parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of “helicopter” parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world.
“The world is actually even safer than when I was a child, and I just want to give them the same freedom and independence that I had — basically an old-fashioned childhood,” she said. “I think it’s absolutely critical for their development — to learn responsibility, to experience the world, to gain confidence and competency.”
[Keep reading. . .]
See also this followup story:
Two days after the story of their children’s unsupervised walk home from a park became the latest flash point in an ongoing cultural debate about what constitutes responsible parenting, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were still explaining their “old-fashioned” methods of child-rearing.
They eat dinner with their children. They enforce bedtimes, restrict screen times and assign chores. They go to synagogue. More controversially, they let their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter venture out together to walk or play without adults.
“How have we gotten so crazy that what was just a normal childhood a generation ago is considered radical?” Danielle Meitiv asked in the living room of her Silver Spring home as yet another news crew dropped by to question the couple.
She and her husband are facing an investigation for neglect, they say, after allowing their children to walk together unaccompanied from a Silver Spring park along busy Georgia Avenue toward home, a mile south.
They made it halfway before police picked the children up, alerted after someone called.
[Keep reading. . .]
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